


it took me all of my fire to make it out alive (and you left me dead in the water)

by transgirluma (gayapplewhite)



Category: Descendants (Disney Movies)
Genre: Curses, Forgiveness, Gen, Italics, Lowercase, Revenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-06
Updated: 2017-09-06
Packaged: 2018-12-24 08:16:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12008712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gayapplewhite/pseuds/transgirluma
Summary: “and then after her remedial goodness class, she sees a dark haired senior with red lipstick only a shade removed from dried blood watching her. it takes her a moment, and then she realizes — this is melody, daughter of queen ariel and king eric, granddaughter to king triton. this is the mermaid uma has so avidly feared.”or; uma and melody.





	it took me all of my fire to make it out alive (and you left me dead in the water)

**Author's Note:**

> i've had this fic idea ever since uma was first announced and i kept putting it off because i thought they were going to introduce a canon daughter of ariel. they have not. i got tired of waiting. also, i usually place the events of d1 at the end of the character's sophomore year, and then d2 as being in the fall of their junior year, but i put d1's events in the fall of sophomore year and d2's in the spring so that melody could be a few years older than the other characters. 
> 
> the title comes from spelles's “dead in the water”. please kudos and comment if you enjoyed!!

uma has always had nightmares about mermaids. about them dragging her down into the cold, cold ocean as she struggles to return to her sea-creature form. about wisps of fire-red hair brushing past her foot. about their bone-cold fingers on her ankles dragging her deeper, deeper, down. needless to say, she's always been a bit wary about water she cannot see the bottom of. not that she showed it, of course (uma will not appear weak, not where others can see her). but she's always been afraid that mermaids will come up from the deep, with their ice-cold fingers and weed-like tangles of hair, and drag her down as revenge for what her mother did to them. 

and now she's going to school with one. a mermaid that is. which uma isn't exactly thrilled about, but melody is a senior, and uma, like the rest of the vks, is finishing out the tail end of their sophomore year. technically, uma knows that she shouldn't even be in high school, considering that there was no school on the isle, but she's bright and picking it up quickly. but regardless. there is no reason for uma to see melody at all. so there's no reason for her to worry. except — on uma's third week in auradon prep, she wakes up and can no longer speak. 

she tries to speak, but not even choking noises come out, and it's almost as though someone has taken her voice, picked it out of her throat and stole it in the middle of the night. she's alone in her room when she finds out, and she immediately texts mal, explaining what's happened. mal is there in five minutes, evie at her side, and neither of them leaves her side for the rest of the day, explaining a half-truth of what's happened (“she's sick, her voice is shot, she'll be better soon,” they say) and uma thinks, not for the first time, that mal and her cohorts are better friends than enemies. not that uma has exactly what mal and her friends have with each other (she thinks she had something like it with mal, once upon a time and ages ago) but none of that helps uma understand where her voice has gone. and then after her remedial goodness class, she sees a dark haired senior with red lipstick only a shade removed from dried blood watching her. it takes her a moment, and then she realizes — this is melody, daughter of queen ariel and king eric, granddaughter to king triton. this is the mermaid uma has so avidly feared. melody vanishes, back into the crowd of people going from class to class, and uma is left staring at the place where she stood. somehow, uma thinks, melody knows what has happened to her voice. and so, uma knows what she has to do. 

she goes to melody's room late at night, a room she's found out melody shares with one jane darling (her first thought upon learning that is how funny it is her and harry's mortal enemies share a room, her second thought is how easy it would be to attack them, and her third thought is how ashamed of her second thought she is. she doesn't know all the laws of auradon, but she thinks ambushing and murdering is against the law). she knocks at the door, and a girl with blonde-brown hair cut into a bob just below her chin. she rolls her eyes, and then leans back into the room and yells for melody. melody comes to the door, eyes wide and blue. she looks like her father, uma thinks, recalling all the official events she'd seen televised that included ariel and eric. uma glares at melody, scribbling down “what did you do to me?” in all caps in a notebook evie had lent her for the day. her pencil presses against the page and the lead splinters into tiny fragments. melody sighs, nodding at her roommate, and jane leaves.

“come in,” melody says, softly. the room is small, not quite unlike uma's own, but there are two beds instead of one (they hadn't wanted to give her a princess for a roommate, so until king ben got off his ass and brought over more vks, uma was on her own. which she was fine with — it meant more space for her, after all). melody settles in on her desk chair, and uma takes a seat on the bed without asking first. she knows asking first is the polite, _auradonian_ thing to do, but maybe she'd feel a bit more inclined to ask if her voice hadn't been stolen from her. just maybe. once they're in the room, and the door is shut, melody stiffens. her posture becomes more rigid, her eyes become darker and colder, like the ocean during a storm (uma thinks she can see a hint of the reflection of a sea in her eyes. the benefits of having a mermaid for a mom).

“i took your voice,” melody says, a bit darker, a bit colder. uma thinks she can smell the faint smell of sea-salt and lavender, and she thinks this must be melody's magic. her own magic feels like electricity underwater, striking through your veins. not that uma has used magic much, after cotillion. magic tends to make people in auradon nervous). mal's magic is the warm, burning feeling of fire and the scent of charred flowers lasts at the site of her spells even once she's long gone. jay's is like smoke, wispy and weak. uma doesn't even know if he knows he has it. but back to melody's sea-salt and lavender scented magic. uma sees that melody's desk is covered with spell books, with magic and herbs and crystals. “you deserved it,” melody says, out of the silence.

uma wants to reply to this. she opts, instead, for silence. “your mother tried to take everything my mother had. your aunt tried to kill me. your _family_ is the reason i have nightmares at night!” how ironic, uma thinks. they both have nightmares about the other. she does not comment on this irony.

“it wasn't my fault,” uma writes, pencil almost snapping again in her hurry to get the words out. “ _i_ didn't do any of that.”

“oh, but you were the one who spelled king ben. and who tried to kill everyone at cotillion.” uma doesn't know how to tell melody that she was never really trying to kill everyone at cotillion. only scare them a little. the only one she'd been trying to kill had been mal, for taking everything uma should have had. and, well. everyone knows how _that_ turned out.

“it was a mistake,” uma writes. she's only sort of lying. she'd known what she'd been doing, but she hadn't meant to do all of this. she'd only wanted to save the people who were counting on her.

melody's eyes burn. “a mistake?” she spits. “your _mistake_ almost drowned the king. it meant my parents almost took me out of school for the last two months of my senior year because _you are your mother's daughter_.”

uma's mouth almost drops. she writes furiously on her notebook, pencil ripping the page. “i am my mother's daughter? i never stole anyone's voice — which by the way, your mother _agreed_ to, and it's not like ursula ever treated me like her daughter. just another servant. she never saw me as her _daughter_. and i may be my mother's daughter, but what you did, melody, it makes you her _heir_.”

melody doesn't speak for a long moment, just looks down and lets her long black hair form a curtain over her eyes. uma could almost forget that she is the one with the voiceless curse upon her and not melody. “i'm sorry,” melody says, after a long moment. “i didn't think — ” uma scoffs. of course she hadn't thought. melody glances up, and shoots uma a glare before continuing. uma nods her head in agreement. she probably (definitely) deserved that glare. “i never thought about what it would be like to have ursula for a mother.” melody finishes. uma raises an eyebrow. obviously. melody smiles, a little sadly. “i can fix your voice, if you want.” uma nods, and melody turns to her desk, and what she's doing is obscured by the curve of her back. it takes a while, but eventually melody turns back, and uma can speak. her voice is a bit lower, a bit more frog-like than it was before, but she supposed trapping a voice in a jar was bound to throw it off a bit. melody says that she thinks that it'll sound normal soon enough.

“so what was growing up with ursula like?” melody asks, after a long pause.

“shitty,” uma replies honestly. “she was never...she never cared about me. once i knocked her shelf of potions over and she made me kneel in the broken glass to clean it up. she's never cared about me.” uma's never admitted this much to any one person. she blinks back tears. she doesn't like the way tears make her seem weak.

melody looks closely at her, blinking back her own tears. “hey,” she says. “you can cry. it's okay.”

uma nods, and she lets the tears slide down her cheeks. melody smiles sympathetically, and she's crying too, and she slides over to the bed and is hugging uma tighter than uma has ever been hugged before and murmuring “i'm so sorry,” and it's in that moment uma realizes that she might not be afraid of mermaids anymore.


End file.
